In providing cellular telephone services, telecommunications providers are always interested in providing feature-rich, high-quality service using the least cost network deployment. Accordingly, there is a desire to constantly develop and deploy improved transmission technologies. Such technologies may include new transmission protocols, frequencies and/or techniques which often times need to be deployed across expansive geographic regions of the world.
However, improved transmission technology often translates into changing the coverage radius of existing wireless transmission sites. That is, the coverage radius of a given transmission site can dramatically increase after the deployment of the new technology, thereby creating an excess number of transmission sites. This can represent a pronounced network inefficiency given the high cost of maintaining these excess transmission sites.
Accordingly, it is likely that deployment of improved transmission technologies will result in a corresponding need to decommission certain existing transmission sites. The problem presented is one of selection. Namely, the process of selecting which sites should be decommissioned is currently a labour-intensive one, in which technicians engage in the manual process of essentially “eyeballing” which sites should be decommissioned. When the geographic area involved in this process spans cities and even counties, it can be a daunting process. As such, there is a need in the art for improving and even automating the process of selectively decommissioning excess wireless transmission sites.